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25–378 PDF 2006

S. HRG. 109–222

TERRORISM: EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, TECHNOLOGY 

AND HOMELAND SECURITY

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY 

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

OCTOBER 26, 2005

Serial No. J–109–46

Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary

(

(II)

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY 

ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania, Chairman 

ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah 

CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa 

JON KYL, Arizona 

MIKE DEWINE, Ohio 

JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama 

LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina 

JOHN CORNYN, Texas 

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas 

TOM COBURN, Oklahoma 

PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont 

EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts 

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware 

HERBERT KOHL, Wisconsin 

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California 

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin 

CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York 

RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois 

DAVID BROG, Staff Director 

MICHAEL O’NEILL, Chief Counsel 

BRUCE A. COHEN, Democratic Chief Counsel and Staff Director 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, TECHNOLOGY AND HOMELAND SECURITY

JON KYL, Arizona, Chairman 

ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah 

CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa 

JOHN CORNYN, Texas 

MIKE DEWINE, Ohio 

JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama 

LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina 

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California 

EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts 

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware 

HERBERT KOHL, Wisconsin 

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin 

RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois 

STEPHEN HIGGINS, Majority Chief Counsel 

STEVEN CASH, Democratic Chief Counsel 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

STATEMENTS OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS 

Page

Cornyn, Hon. John, a U.S. Senator from the State of Texas ............................... 19

prepared statement .......................................................................................... 42

Feinstein, Hon. Dianne, a U.S. Senator from the State of California ................. 3

Kyl, Hon. Jon, a U.S. Senator from the State of Arizona .................................... 1

Leahy, Hon. Patrick J., a U.S. Senator from the State of Vermont, prepared 

statement .............................................................................................................. 62

WITNESSES 

Bettenhausen, Matthew R., Director, California Office of Homeland Security, 

Sacramento, California ........................................................................................ 11

Gorton, Hon. Slade, 9/11 Public Discourse Project, Seattle, Washington ........... 4

O’Hanlon, Michael, Senior Fellow and Co-Holder, Sydney Stein Chair, Foreign Policy Studies Program, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. ......... 14

Renteria, Henry R., Director, California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, Mather, California ....................................................................................... 9

Thomas, Wayne C., Vice President, Homeland Security, Innovative Emergency Management, Inc., Baton Rouge, Louisiana ............................................ 7

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 

Responses of Michael O’Hanlon to questions submitted by Senator Biden ........ 34

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD 

Bettenhausen, Matthew R., Director, California Office of Homeland Security, 

Sacramento, California, prepared statement ..................................................... 37

Department of the Treasury, Office of Economic Policy, Washington, D.C., 

report ..................................................................................................................... 48

Gorton, Hon. Slade, 9/11 Public Discourse Project, Seattle, Washington, prepared statement ................................................................................................... 56

O’Hanlon, Michael, Senior Fellow and Co-Holder, Sydney Stein Chair, Foreign Policy Studies Program, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., prepared statement ................................................................................................... 64

RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, research brief ............................. 84

Renteria, Henry R., Director, California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, Mather, California, prepared statement .................................................... 87

Thomas, Wayne C., Vice President, Homeland Security, Innovative Emergency Management, Inc., Baton Rouge, Louisiana, prepared statement and 

attachments .......................................................................................................... 95

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TERRORISM: EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS 

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2005 

U.S. SENATE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, TECHNOLOGY AND HOMELAND

SECURITY, COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY, Washington, DC. 

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:32 a.m., in 

room SD–226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Jon Kyl, 

Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding. 

Present: Senators Kyl, Cornyn, Feinstein, and Durbin. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JON KYL, A U.S. SENATOR 

FROM THE STATE OF ARIZONA 

Chairman KYL. Good morning and welcome to the Subcommittee 

on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security of the Senate 

Judiciary Committee. We are pleased to have all of you here this 

morning for what I think is going to be an enlightening and very 

important hearing. 

Let me begin by noting that Senator Feinstein and I will make 

opening statements. If Senator Cornyn arrives at an appropriate 

time, I will call upon him for an opening statement, too, and then 

we will go right to our witnesses. We have one panel today, but I 

suspect that that one panel will engage in a pretty complete and 

lively discussion and there is no time constraint here is the main 

point I wanted to make. 

Hurricane Katrina exposed the weakness of our Nation’s emergency preparedness. As reported in an October 20 Washington Post 

article, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff acknowledged that Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed FEMA, exposing major 

flaws in the nation’s preparedness for terrorism and natural disasters. Secretary Chertoff vowed to reengineer U.S. preparedness. 

We have learned a lot in the weeks since Hurricane Katrina. 

Today, this Subcommittee will focus on the question of whether we 

are prepared for a possible terrorist attack involving problems similar to those caused by the natural disaster in the Gulf Coast. A 

moderately sophisticated terrorist attack could easily replicate the 

type and amount of damage caused by this natural disaster, I believe, though I will ask you all whether that is, in fact, correct, and 

the response would be even more difficult to coordinate because we 

wouldn’t have much time in terms of warning, if any, as to when 

or where such an attack might occur. 

The objective of this hearing is to gain a better understanding of 

the types of terrorist attacks that could still take place, specifically 

those that could have an impact similar to Hurricane Katrina’s, the 

2

key success factors in planning for and responding to an attack, the 

emergency preparedness of the Federal Government and how it 

should work with State and local authorities to respond effectively, 

and any existing shortfalls that need attention by State, local, and 

Federal authorities to improve readiness. 

This Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security has held numerous hearings about terrorist attack, such as 

attacks against seaports, attacks with biological weapons, and attacks against critical information infrastructure. Earlier this year, 

the Subcommittee held a hearing on the potentially devastating impact of an electromagnetic pulse explosion. 

Today, the Subcommittee will examine what should be done to 

achieve an immediate, effective, and successful response to terrorist attacks. The Subcommittee will hear from five expert witnesses, one former Senator and member of the 9/11 Commission, 

a private sector expert, two State officials from California, and a 

scholar from the Brookings Institution. Senator Feinstein will introduce the two California witnesses in her opening statement and 

I will introduce the other members of the panel. 

I will begin with former Senator Slade Gorton. He has served in 

public office for four decades, 18 of those years here in the U.S. 

Senate. Late in 2002, then-Majority Leader Trent Lott appointed 

him to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the 

United States, where he served with distinction and played a 

prominent role in formulating the final report. He will testify to the 

Commission’s findings and warnings about preparedness for terrorist attacks. 

Wayne Thomas is Vice President of Homeland Security for Innovative Emergency Management, IEM, a Louisiana-based private 

corporation focused on improving emergency preparedness at Federal, State, and local levels. IEM has particular expertise planning 

for responses to natural disasters and attacks involving weapons of 

mass destruction. Founded in 1985, IEM has worked with Federal 

organizations such as the Office of Domestic Preparedness, the 

Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Department of 

Defense, as well as State and local emergency management agencies in more than 25 States. Before joining IEM, Mr. Thomas was 

administrator of the chemical demilitarization program for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. 

Michael O’Hanlon is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution 

and he formerly worked at the Congressional Budget Office. He 

specializes in defense issues, leads the work on Brookings’ Iraq 

Index, and has served as team leader on two Brookings studies on 

homeland security in the last 3 years. The latest Brookings study 

on homeland security is expected to be published early in 2006. Dr. 

O’Hanlon received a Ph.D. in public and international affairs from 

Princeton University. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Woodrow 

Wilson School at Princeton University. 

As I said, Senator Feinstein will introduce our two California 

guests today. 

One final note about the witnesses at today’s hearing. I want to 

point out that I invited officials from both the Department of 

Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to testify. A 

witness from DOD was prepared to testify, but DHS, the agency 

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charged with leading the response in the wake of an attack, informed me that FEMA was too busy at this time to send a witness 

and that no other witness could be made available. DOD was not 

inclined to send a witness if DHS witnesses were not going to testify. I find this regrettable, but look forward to hearing from both 

DHS and DOD in the future. 

The United States must be prepared to respond to terrorist attacks. Hurricane Katrina exposed the weaknesses in our Nation’s 

emergency preparedness. We must determine whether similar 

problems could occur with a terrorist attack. 

I would like to thank Senator Feinstein, as usual, for helping me 

prepare for and plan for this hearing. She and I see eye to eye on 

matters of national security and the need to respond to terrorist attacks and it is always a privilege to work with her in a very bipartisan way on this problem that, after all, confronts all Americans 

equally. 

Senator Feinstein, thank you. The floor is yours. 

STATEMENT OF HON. DIANNE FEINSTEIN, A U.S. SENATOR 

FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the 

comments and I respond to them in kind. I thank you very much 

for holding these hearings. I thank our witnesses. It is certainly 

great to see Slade Gorton again. Welcome back. I will make my remarks very brief. 

September 11 is now 4 years away, and since that time, it has 

been commonplace to say everything has changed since September 

11. And one thing that was supposed to change was our readiness 

to respond to a catastrophe. With that in mind, the Department of 

Homeland Security was forged and a large number of departments 

were put together with a total of some 22,000 employees. It was 

supposed to be strengthened. The ability to plan was supposed to 

have been made greater. 

I increasingly believe that at least with respect to emergency preparedness, September 11 did not change everything. I think Hurricane Katrina is testimony to that. With Hurricane Katrina, it was 

5 days’ warning, and yet there was not the ability to evacuate and 

there certainly was not the ability to respond adequately. That lack 

of response was inadequate on all levels, local, State, as well as 

Federal. 

So today, we examine the question, are we adequately prepared? 

This isn’t an academic debate. This is what could happen in the 

wake of a terrorist attack or a huge natural disaster on one of our 

cities. If the government response to Katrina is any indication, it 

would be a time of chaos and confusion with American life at risk. 

I was pleased to see from Senator Gorton’s prepared testimony 

that he and the 9/11 Public Discourse Project have strongly endorsed efforts to require that scarce homeland security resources be 

allocated based on the best possible risk analysis. This is an assessment of threat, vulnerability, and consequence, and as you know, 

Senator, we haven’t achieved that yet because everyone wants their 

part of the homeland security pie regardless of whether the assessment of threat, vulnerability, and consequence indicates that they 

should have part of that pie. 

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I am the original cosponsor, along with Senator Cornyn, of Senate legislation to accomplish this. This legislation was not approved 

by the Senate. The companion legislation passed the House overwhelmingly and is now being considered as part of the USA PATRIOT Reauthorization Act conference. 

I also hope that our witnesses will address the questions that I 

think most Americans share. Is the level of preparedness for catastrophe higher than it was in 2001? Have things, in fact, improved? 

If so, how did things go so horribly wrong in Louisiana and what 

needs to be done to make us safer? 

It is my pleasure to introduce our two distinguished panelists 

from my State, the State of California, Henry Renteria, Director of 

the State’s Office of Emergency Services, and Matthew 

Bettenhausen, Director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security. Respectively, they are charged with the operations and policies of the State of California in responding to disaster. 

Over the course of 19 years as the head of the city of Oakland’s 

Office of Emergency Services, Henry Renteria coordinated Oakland’s response to eight Federal emergencies, including the Loma 

Prieta earthquake of 1989. That is the one in which a section of 

the Oakland Bay Bridge came down. More recently, he led the recovery efforts in San Joaquin County when a levee collapsed, flooding thousands of acres of farmland. 

Matt Bettenhausen is a former Deputy Governor of Illinois with 

extensive law enforcement experience as a Federal prosecutor. He 

played a critical role in the development of the Department of 

Homeland Security as the first Director of State and Territorial Coordination, establishing the procedures linking State and Federal 

homeland security efforts. 

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I think we are ready for 

our witnesses. 

Chairman KYL. Thank you very much, Senator Feinstein. 

We are ready to begin, and Slade Gorton, the floor is yours. 

STATEMENT OF HON. SLADE GORTON, 9/11 PUBLIC 

DISCOURSE PROJECT, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 

Senator GORTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Feinstein 

has already given a part of my speech, which was particularly flattering, but I will begin at the beginning. 

If terrorists strike again on American soil, it will be local emergency responders—police, fire fighters, and emergency medical 

technicians—who will be on the front lines. Local emergency preparedness is now a matter of national security. In addition, of 

course, while the Federal Government through FEMA is not generally a first responder, its utterly inadequate response to the 

needs of both victims and first responders at the time of Katrina 

calls for dramatic changes in its preparation for and response to 

both natural and terrorist-caused emergencies. 

On 9/11, shortcomings in emergency communications hindered 

first responders and led to an unnecessary loss of lives, especially 

bad among fire fighters in the Twin Towers and between agencies 

responding to the World Trade Center site. As the heroic fire fighters in both towers climbed higher, their radio transmissions were 

disrupted by the many floors between them and their commanders. 

5

Communications with their chiefs in the lobby became weaker and 

more sporadic. Because so many people were trying to speak at 

once, available channels were overwhelmed. Transmissions overlapped and often became indecipherable. Many fire fighters in the 

North Tower didn’t hear the evacuation order issued after the 

South Tower collapsed. Some weren’t even aware that it had come 

down. 

Meanwhile, communications among agencies were poor. In one 

well-known example, fire chiefs in the lobbies of the tower got no 

information from the police helicopters circling above. Because of 

poor inter-agency communications, many redundant searches were 

conducted. This wasted precious time and caused the deaths of 

many heroic first responders. 

Hurricane Katrina reminds us that this problem has not been 

solved. In Katrina, poor public safety communications again delayed the response. New Orleans and the three neighboring parishes were using different equipment and different frequencies. 

They couldn’t talk to one another. Helicopter crews couldn’t talk to 

rescuers in boats. National Guard commanders in Mississippi had 

to use human couriers to carry messages. 

Last July, the 9/11 Commission recommended that Congress turn 

over broadcast spectrum to first responders to improve communication between agencies and to allow interoperability among agencies. The House and Senate are finally moving on legislation to reclaim analog TV spectrum currently held by broadcasters and to 

designate some of it for use by emergency responders, but the date 

in the bill just released by the Commerce Committee is April 7, 

2009, nearly 8 years after the 9/11 attacks. 

By contrast, less than 4 years after Pearl Harbor, both Japan 

and Germany had been defeated. It is ridiculous that it should take 

eight years to implement such an obvious response to the 9/11 attacks. Experts say that this transition could be accomplished as 

early as 18 months from today and certainly within 2 years. There 

will surely be another terrorist attack or a major disaster in the 

next 4 years. We need a sense of urgency to get this done now, not 

4 years from now. 

On 9/11 in New York and New Orleans, command structures for 

emergency response were not clearly defined. It was not clear beforehand who was in charge or what each agency’s responsibilities 

were. This confusion cost lives. 

By contrast, in Arlington, Virginia at the Pentagon, the command structure did work and there was not loss of lives among 

first responders after the attack took place. I also have the impression that Mississippi’s response to Katrina did not suffer from the 

same problems of command and control as did that of Louisiana. 

Command and control in response to Hurricane Rita seems to have 

worked better, as well. The Committee may well wish to examine 

the facts and circumstances of command and control in each of 

these cases so that we can learn what worked and what didn’t. 

The 9/11 Commission recommended that local governments adopt 

the incident command system. This system defines who is in 

charge and what agencies’ responsibilities are in a crisis. Every locality should have a clear emergency plan with every agency’s specific role laid out beforehand in black and white. As we saw in 

6

Katrina, if local plans are not highly specific and are not regularly 

rehearsed, confusion is inevitable. 

DHS set a hard deadline of October 1, 2006, for localities to establish and exercise a command and control system to qualify for 

first responder grants. Don’t let that deadline slip. Localities that 

do not have clear, well-rehearsed incident command plans by that 

date should not receive Federal Homeland Security grants. 

Now, Senator Feinstein has already spoken to risk-based funding. Since 2001, you have allocated more than $8 billion to help 

State and local governments prepare for terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, these funds have not been guided by any assessment of risk 

and vulnerability. The 9/11 Commission made a common sense recommendation that it be based on risks and vulnerabilities, not politics. These funds are national security funds, they are not general 

revenue sharing. They are too important to be spent without any 

guarantee that they are actually reducing our vulnerabilities. 

Both of you support this kind of reform, as do many other Senators. As Senator Feinstein said, the House proposal on the subject 

is an excellent one. It is now in conference with the Senate. The 

Chairman and Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission and the Public Discourse Project will soon submit a letter to that Conference 

Committee strongly recommending the House version, which is 

very similar to what Senators Cornyn and Feinstein proposed here 

in the Senate. We urge that that be adopted. 

The Intelligence Reform Act required DHS to produce a national 

strategy for transportation security by April 1, 2005. We bitterly 

criticized the agency for not having done so in our report in midSeptember. We were told the next day, well, in fact, they had finished it on the first of July, but that it was classified, apparently, 

even the fact that it existed. As such, it is unavailable to the public, the transportation community, State and local governments, 

and first responders. What use is it if the people who have to adapt 

to it don’t know anything about its existence or what it says? 

Next, DHS has not produced the National Risk and 

Vulnerabilities Assessment for critical infrastructures that was due 

on June 15, making it very, very difficult to distribute Homeland 

Security funds in a rational manner. Moreover, that kind of assessment needs to be an ongoing process. It is not a one-time job. 

Finally, as Hurricane Katrina reminded us, large-scale emergency responses are bound to occur again in the future, whether 

from terrorist attacks or natural disasters. The question, Mr. 

Chairman, is are we better prepared for the next major terrorist 

attack, for the next natural disaster? Are we prepared for an attack 

with a dirty bomb or one with chemical or biological weapons? Are 

our emergency communications good enough? Are our response 

plans updated and rehearsed? Are we directing Federal funds as 

they are needed to protect our real vulnerabilities? 

Well, at least with respect to those last questions, the answer is 

no. After 9/11, after Katrina, we are still not prepared. We will do 

anything we can to help you and your counterparts in this Committee and in both Houses to enact these common-sense recommendations this year for the safety of our first responders and 

the communities they are pledged to protect. The lessons of 9/11 

7

and again of Katrina are too painful to be learned again a third 

time. 

[The prepared statement of Senator Gorton appears as a submission for the record.] 

Chairman KYL. Thank you, Senator Gorton, for that excellent 

statement. 

Next, Mr. Wayne Thomas. 

STATEMENT OF WAYNE C. THOMAS, VICE PRESIDENT, HOMELAND SECURITY, INNOVATIVE EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT, 

INC., BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA 

Mr. THOMAS. Chairman Kyl, Ranking Member Senator Feinstein, 

other members of the Committee, I appreciate the opportunity and 

the honor to be here today. It is very significant for our company 

to have this opportunity and we appreciate it. 

On the screen, you will see an image of a dirty bomb attack that 

we projected on the West side of the Capitol building here. I think 

this brings home to us what we are dealing with as a potential scenario. Should this event actually occur, part of this area may be 

uninhabitable for many, many years because it is a radiological device. 

Recently, we witnessed the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and 

what happened along the Gulf Coast. I think we want to look at 

a comparison between terrorist events and the natural disasters 

that we just experienced. 

The image that you are seeing now shows the extent of the impact of Hurricane Katrina and this model that you are seeing here 

is the storm surge model. We actually ran this model a year ago 

for an exercise that we did and we were aware at that time that 

this would be the extent of damage from a hurricane of this type. 

So we are projecting the geographical extent of the damage here 

into an image. We are going to compare this with a couple of other 

types of scenarios. 

The first one that you will see is an IED event. This happens to 

be in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah stadium. This is a 

vehicle-mounted IED, and you will see that there are multiple IED 

attacks that happen in this one scenario that we have utilized. The 

message here is that this type of an attack is somewhat localized 

to the area, that the damage and the casualties would be localized, 

but the damage and effect on certainly the population where this 

happens in the Nation would be significant. 

Second, you are going to see a chemical warfare attack in San 

Francisco at Golden Gate Park. This is a release of GB agent, 

Sarin, the same chemical agent that was used in Tokyo in 1996. 

A very small quantity is used here. The effects on those in the park 

would obviously be catastrophic, and we will project at the end of 

the simulation the casualties that we are looking at. 

The last scenario that we have here is an anthrax attack on a 

Midwest city. I think once you see the simulation, you will see 

what city it is. This is a simulation that we did a couple of years 

ago and it is an airborne release of weaponized anthrax that impacts the entire city and beyond. In the bottom right corner, you 

can see the red and yellow images appearing. That is the distribution and spreading of the anthrax as it migrates through the comVerDate 0ct 09 2002 10:52 Jan 10, 2006 Jkt 025355 PO 00000 Frm 00011 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 S:\GPO\HEARINGS\25378.TXT SJUD4 PsN: CMORC
8

munities. This would be absolutely catastrophic in this location or 

any urban environment were this to occur. 

So how do these events all compare? You can see that here is the 

estimated fatalities that we have from these simulations. You can 

see that Hurricane Katrina that we saw and continue to see in 

New Orleans is less than we would anticipate from the bioterrorism anthrax simulation. 

Returning back to the dirty bomb scenario, I think it is important that we also think about the Hurricane Wilma that recently 

crossed Florida and caused substantial damage there, went right 

up the East Coast very quickly and a few days ago was causing 

quite a bit of rain here. If that had moved a little bit to the West, 

it would have impacted D.C. The combination of a terrorist event 

along with a natural disaster could also be a very significant event. 

I want to mention a few points here that from our experience 

working with many of our clients across the Nation and over the 

last 20 years, what we have seen from our experience. There are, 

in terms of catastrophic planning, I think various things that have 

been done, and one of the things that we have done back in July 

of 2004 was to develop an exercise, a planning exercise approach 

that we called Hurricane Pam. This was a Category 3 hurricane 

that made landfall in Southeast Louisiana. The consequences of 

that were used by the local communities, the State, and the Federal agencies for planning and 14 plans were developed at that 

time. 

The consequences of a Hurricane Katrina-type event were well 

known in that area and by all of the response agencies. In fact, the 

model that we showed earlier demonstrated the extent of the storm 

surge that we knew well over a year ago would happen should this 

storm make landfall in this particular area. 

The key aspect that we see working with our clients is that planning is the cornerstone of really everything that we do. But what 

we don’t see is that we don’t define what we want as specific, acceptable results from developing these plans. What is it we want 

to achieve? What is it that the public demands of us? 

We write plans, we execute those plans, but we don’t always define what we want, and that is a very important distinction that 

we need to address. Simply having a plan that works well may not 

achieve the results that you want if you don’t determine what you 

want to achieve in advance, and that is a very significant change 

in planning approach that we would recommend. 

The second issue is the actual plans that we developed, do we 

really understand the consequences that these disasters are going 

to have on our communities and on our citizens? We need that comprehensive understanding of a terrorist attack, whatever type we 

want to consider, natural hazards, hurricanes, earthquakes. Let us 

understand what the consequences are, because that helps us plan 

effectively. Unless we utilize those detailed consequence assessments, again, we cannot plan effectively. 

The third point I would make is that we have to address the full 

integration of Federal, State, and local response capabilities. As 

Senator Gorton said, local response is first-line national response 

now and that is so accurate. All politics is local. I think Tip O’Neill 

said that many years ago. But all disasters are local. It is those 

9

local first responders that are going to be there when it immediately happens and they are going to be there over the years for 

the clean-up and recovery from that disaster. They are critical to 

solving the solutions here. So bringing the right people together is 

very important from the front-line local governments, State governments, and Federal agencies. 

And the last thing I wanted to mention is that we have an exercise program that we utilize to test our plans. I think it is important that we make that program as rigorous as it can be. We conduct a lot of exercises that are essentially open book. We just test 

the plan and we check the marks here. But we have to have an 

exercise program that is rigorous, that ensures that we can effectively do what we say we think we can do. 

I will sum it up in one statement, if I can. We have to plan together, train together, exercise together, and that puts us where we 

can respond and recover together as a nation. Thank you, sir. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Thomas appears as a submission 

for the record.] 

Chairman KYL. Thank you, Mr. Thomas. 

Mr. Renteria? 

STATEMENT OF HENRY R. RENTERIA, DIRECTOR, CALIFORNIA 

GOVERNOR’S OFFICE OF EMERGENCY SERVICES, MATHER, 

CALIFORNIA 

Mr. RENTERIA. Thank you and good morning, Chairman Kyl, 

Ranking Member Feinstein, and Subcommittee members. Thank 

you for the opportunity you have given me to be here today to testify on this very important subject. 

Before I go into my remarks, I would like to, if we can, show a 

very brief video that we have brought along with us. 

[A videotape was played.] 

Mr. RENTERIA. Thank you. As you can see from the video, California, because of our history, and we do have a long history of natural disasters, we learned very many valuable lessons. We have 

taken these lessons and we have incorporated them into planning 

for the next one. In summary, we have had our Katrinas in California. We have had several disasters. We have learned from every 

single one of them and we have applied them to the next one. 

As you saw, the Incident Command System is something that 

came out of the Forest Service. This was something that was used 

to manage large numbers of resources fighting large forest fires. 

This Incident Command System has now been pretty much developed into the civilian system as our Standardized Emergency Management System. SEMS, as we like to refer to it, is our bible for 

responding to disasters. This is the backbone of the system that is 

in California. Because this is an organizational system that can be 

used to deal with large-scale events, it allows the opportunity for 

several agencies to respond together under a unified command and 

deal with the events of the disaster. 

As you saw from the video also, the Federal Government has now 

adopted the National Incident Management System, NIMS. It is a 

real tribute to California that they took our system and applied it, 

but I must also point out, the Federal Government did not use 

NIMS at the Katrina event and this was really a major issue that 

10

led to the things going wrong. If they had used NIMS as we have 

depicted here, I think we wouldn’t have seen some of the issues 

that came up. 

I also want to use this opportunity also to talk a little bit about 

interoperability. We have heard that word before and that is a 

major concern that we have. But I also want to show you that 

interoperability is something that we have taken very seriously, 

but it is also exacerbated by the fact that we are such a large 

State. We have unique topography in California that gives us major 

challenges and we have a huge number of response agencies. 

But we have some success stories. I think this is something that 

I would like to point out. We have purchased what we call our 

black boxes. These are pieces of equipment that can be brought to 

a scene where first responders can literally plug into these boxes 

in order to solve some of the interoperability problems. We also 

have radio caches that we bring out to the scene to distribute to 

first responders who are showing up that may not have the radio 

frequencies that we have. 

We have identified some success stories on a regional level, specifically in San Diego, Orange County, Sacramento, and even the 

Bay area. They have used some of the resources we have gotten 

from Homeland Security to develop some regional capabilities that 

gives us a model to follow for the rest of the State. 

But we still need help. We need some guidance. The Federal 

Government needs to provide us some guidance on interoperability. 

What are those standards that you want us to follow? And we need 

the help with the frequencies, as was mentioned earlier. Frequencies is a major issue for us all over the country, and these frequencies and the spectrum that we need to have addressed so that 

we can have our interoperability taken care of. 

I also want to point out, someone asked, what is the proper role 

of the Federal Government in a disaster? My response is, the Federal Government needs to be a partner. They need to be a partner 

with the State and with local government before, during, and after 

a disaster. Before the disaster, we must all speak with a single 

voice in helping spread the message of preparedness, preparedness 

from the level of the government, preparedness at the private sector, and preparedness for the individual citizens. 

During a disaster, they need to also bring the resources in to 

help us respond and save lives, protect property. But also during 

a disaster, the Federal Government must also be part of a unified 

command. We have a system set up in California. We incorporate 

the Federal Government when they respond to our request, and so 

part of that unified command must be there for them to also participate in. 

And after a disaster, besides bringing disaster assistance, which 

we obviously need, the Federal Government also needs to help us 

promote mitigation. The mitigation programs are the key to preventing some of the loss of life and property that we have in some 

of our natural disasters. We need to spend some money ahead of 

time so that we don’t spend so much money after the event. 

As we go forward and we identify the lessons learned, not only 

from Katrina but from past disasters, we will keep applying these 

lessons to our plans, we will keep exercising these plans, and we 

11

will keep providing more training to the necessary governments 

that need to be prepared to respond. But we must also remember 

the old saying that failure is only the opportunity to begin again 

intelligently. I think these are the lessons that we need to prepare 

for. We need to prepare for the next disaster, not the last one, and 

I think we are on that road. Thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Renteria appears as a submission for the record.] 

Chairman KYL. Thank you, Mr. Renteria. 

Mr. Bettenhausen? 

STATEMENT OF MATTHEW R. BETTENHAUSEN, DIRECTOR, 

CALIFORNIA OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY, SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. I want to thank the Committee and each of 

the members for the opportunity to be here and also to praise your 

leadership on these important issues of homeland security. I know, 

Senator Kyl, we have many shared issues on border security in 

California that you have and we appreciate your leadership in providing the additional resources that we need to better secure America’s borders. 

Senator Feinstein, you have been a great partner with Governor 

Schwarzenegger, and just as you operate here in Washington, D.C. 

in a bipartisan fashion, we know that you have been a great partner with the Governor, that we work on homeland security and 

emergency management issues in a nonpartisan, bipartisan way, 

and we appreciate your support. 

It has been a pleasure for me to join the Governor’s team, and 

he has assembled a great team, including my partner here, Henry 

Renteria, but across the board, from food and agriculture to health 

services and we are working together and we appreciate your support and leadership here, and your work with Senator Cornyn, 

whom I have also had the pleasure of working with your daughter, 

Danley, when I was with the Department of Homeland Security. 

You have been great leaders in recognizing that our funding 

must be prioritized, that it must be based on risk, that we must 

look at threat, vulnerability, and consequence. We have limited 

Federal resources and we must prioritize those and I thank you 

both and this Committee for its leadership. 

I also would like to recognize Senator Durbin from my original 

home State of Illinois, where I also had the pleasure of being Deputy Governor and serving as its first Homeland Security Director 

and thank him for his leadership on homeland security issues, not 

only while I was there and leading the Illinois delegation, but 

working to continue making sure that Illinois, like California, is 

well prepared and continues to become better prepared as we look 

at these issues. 

I think it is very appropriate that we look at the issue of terrorism in terms of the lessons learned from Katrina, and that is 

the focus that you have brought here today, and it is very important that we look at it from that perspective, not only from domestic terrorism that we learned from Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombings, but through 9/11 to the 1993 World Trade 

Center bombings which helped save lives because there was better 

12

evacuation planning and there were things that were done when 9/

11 happened 4 years ago. 

But when we look at Katrina, and every one of those lives was 

precious, just as it was with 9/11, but if you look at the consequences there, where we lost approximately 1,200 individuals, 

each deeply important, major disruptions in their lives, but if you 

compare it to terrorism and if you compare it to 9/11, we had three 

times the number of casualties when we look at a potential terrorist attack. 

As Senator Kyl appropriately pointed out, these attacks are not 

going to come—and Senator Feinstein, you did, as well—are not 

going to come with 5 days of warning. They are conspiring against 

us. Their intentions are well known by the intelligence community. 

It is well known by this Committee. They are looking for mass casualties. They are looking for a more spectacular event than 9/11. 

That means that we must keep the focus on terrorism preparedness, where we could have a weapon of mass destruction, a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, that could cause significant 

deaths and casualties. 

One of the things that unfortunately or fortunately, depending on 

how you can kind of look at it, we have not been tested with major 

long-term care for mass casualties. In 9/11 and New York City, we 

were looking that we might have long-term care and needs for burn 

victims. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen, and fortunately, I think 

because of the lessons learned from the 1993 bombing, there were 

a lot less casualties because there were evacuation plans and 

things in place that also saved lives. 

But we have to go and look at what will we do in a major weapon 

of mass destruction event? What will be our medical surge capacity? What will FEMA be able to do in terms of providing support 

to our local, State, and counties in terms of that medical surge capacity that we know just does not exist in all of our communities 

when you are talking about an incident, and as Secretary Chertoff 

has recognized, that they are planning for housing and feeding—

must account for 500,000 or more—or more—and it is not only 

housing and feeding, it is the medical surge capacity that would 

come with that. It comes with the ability to also bring communications, which is another lesson learned from Katrina, again from 9/

11, and as Senator Gorton talked about, we haven’t gotten it yet. 

In 1997, Congress promised our first responders that they would 

have new frequencies and that we would have the capacity to have 

spectrum so that we could pass video, data, and have dedicated 

radio frequencies for our first responders. They were to get that at 

the end of this year. That is not going to happen, and I know the 

House markup is going on, that they are looking at a deadline for 

those spectrums to become available in 2008 and the Senate is 

looking at April of 2009. We need to move quickly to do that because we have learned again and again it is about communications, 

cooperation, and coordination. It is communications, communications, communications. So we need to do that. 

I think one of the things that we look at as we move the media 

off those bands and that we as a Federal Government go to talk 

about auctioning those bands, as the government should—we have 

huge Federal deficits and we need the resources—we were meeting 

13

with Representative Lungren when we were out here. One of the 

things Congress should also consider is when we go and auction 

those things and we receive that money, that we dedicate that 

funding to our first responders so that they can use them to improve their interoperability and their communication capabilities, 

and it would be a good way to help finance it and make sure that 

we are committed to providing those resources. 

Besides communications, again, we need to know that FEMA is 

going to have their logistics systems put in place so that when we 

call on FEMA, that we are going to be able to get the materials 

that we have requested that they have assured us that they are 

there and that we are going to be able to use them. 

Besides housing and feeding, there is also the financing of the 

displaced. I think Secretary Chertoff has talked about this, about 

the need to improve it, and he is working on that, but it may be 

things that the Hill could look at in terms of improving Stafford 

Act so it is fairer to all States and all communities in terms of 

those impacted by disasters. 

I think it is important to recognize, as Secretary Chertoff has, 

that FEMA is not a first responder. It is the State and locals. What 

is FEMA? It is nothing more than our first responders who are out 

there who have staff and are trained to take the urban search and 

rescue teams, the swift water rescue teams, that become a national 

resource in an emergency. Eight of California’s USAR teams were 

in the Gulf. 

We do not need to build Federal capabilities, as Governor Perry 

talked about, a Maytag repairman sort of sitting there waiting to 

be called. We need to better support our State and locals so they 

have those first responders there who can respond to anything 24/

7, respond to incidents that don’t require Federal assistance, but to 

be there for national emergencies as the national asset. So we can 

deploy USAR teams, swift water rescue, disaster medical assistance teams, and again, by USAR, I mean urban search and rescues. 

Again, like Mr. Renteria talked about, we believe in and we need 

the support of the Federal Government, but we do not need the 

Federal Government in charge. We need the Federal Government 

to come in and assist us under civilian authority and control. 

I would like to just talk briefly about IA, an information analysis 

and threat awareness. We need to continue to make improvements 

at all levels of government. I think the Federal Government and 

our intelligence community also needs to know that they can learn 

a lot from our local police officers who are out there. There are a 

lot more of them there. We know lessons learned in terms of Timothy McVeigh. It was local folks that got it. Eric Rudolph, it was 

local police who finally captured him. 

We met and had our identity theft conference when we were in 

California, Senator, and I thank you for taking a leadership on 

that. We know that they need financing and they do it through the 

criminal milieu and there are things that we work at a local level 

that we can help provide, but we also need to know the strategic 

threats that are out there and we need better information sharing. 

And then in terms of infrastructure protection, it was raised by 

Senator Gorton, as well, we need to have that plan. We need to 

14

have what the national infrastructure planning is going to be. We 

need to have better coordination with us in our private sector community in terms of which assets we need to harden and protect, 

and Senator, we have worked closely on many of those issues that 

we see in California, but we know that we can’t harden all critical 

infrastructure, but we need what is the strategic system-wide plan 

so that we look at systems rather than individual targets and how 

do we have the redundancies, the resiliency, and the quick recovery 

capability so no matter where you hit us, and if you hit us in multiple places, we can quickly recover. 

I see that my time has expired. I feel like I am back in the Court 

of Appeals with the clock running. But I would be remiss if I didn’t 

talk about the importance of the individual citizen and the individual citizen’s role to be prepared. That was really driven home 

with Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. You need to have a family disaster 

plan. You need to help our first responders so that they can address those most in need, those who are injured, and so that they 

can focus their attention on restoring services. So to the extent that 

you can take care of yourself, that you can be on your own for 72 

hours, you are helping everybody. You are helping America and 

you are helping yourself and citizen preparedness is a critical part 

of making America safer and better prepared. 

I thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Bettenhausen appears as a submission for the record.] 

Chairman KYL. Thank you, Mr. Bettenhausen. 

Dr. O’Hanlon? 

STATEMENT OF MICHAEL O’HANLON, SENIOR FELLOW AND 

CO-HOLDER, SYDNEY STEIN CHAIR, FOREIGN POLICY STUDIES PROGRAM, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, 

D.C. 

Mr. O’HANLON. Thank you, Senator. It is an honor to be here before you as well as Senator Feinstein. I also want to thank the 

Texas and Illinois delegation for giving us a great World Series so 

far, I know happier for some than others— 

[Laughter.] 

Mr. O’HANLON. —but too late for all of us. If we can agree on 

one thing, the games go too late. I think some people on this panel 

actually watched. Hopefully, you can’t tell from our testimony. 

Anyway, I want to say a few brief things very consistent with the 

general theme of what we have already heard from my colleagues. 

I want to first say, in terms of answering, Senator Feinstein, 

your question about how much progress have we made and where 

do we stand, while there are a lot of things we haven’t done and 

a lot of things we have, I want to put a little bit of a conceptual 

framework in place and suggest that we have put our greatest successful effort so far in the area of prevention, and that is appropriate. I think we have done better with the PATRIOT Act and 

with, even before the PATRIOT Act or concurrently with it, breaking down some of the bureaucratic barriers. The 9/11 Commission 

has offered some ideas on how to do more of this. But even before 

they issued their report, we had made some of these changes. I give 

the Bush administration and the Congress a lot of credit for that. 

15

I think the border integration at DHS, the border security integration has gone better than some of the other efforts there, although it requires continued pressure from those of you who have 

a special interest in the border problem to keep up the resources, 

because I don’t think they are adequate yet. But I do think that 

direction has been appropriate and the integration there has made 

good sense. 

On a few other areas, maybe New York City’s efforts to create 

dedicated police counterterror units and so forth, there have been 

some remarkable efforts at prevention, which I think have been 

helpful and it is part of why we haven’t seen a lot of terrorists on 

American soil. We did learn from President Bush earlier this 

month in his October 6 speech that there had been some attacks 

in the works we hadn’t known about, or at least those of us on the 

outside of government hadn’t heard about prior to that point, but 

overall, I have been relieved that there haven’t been more terrorists found on American soil since 9/11 and more attacks that actually got to the advanced planning stage or the implementation 

stage, and that is a tribute to our prevention and that should remain the top priority, I believe. 

However, it cannot be the only priority because we are not good 

enough and our borders are inherently too open to make sure prevention always works. So we have to think a lot about protection 

of key assets and consequence management, and that is a lot of 

what my colleagues have been talking about, fellow panelists up 

here. I want to make a couple of observations before I get to my 

own graphics. Maybe I will conclude with those, but let me lay out 

a couple of broad thoughts first. 

I would just offer my main recommendations on what we should 

do and what we shouldn’t do at this moment in homeland security 

and next efforts, because I think we always have to be asking, 

what are our resources? What threats are most plausible that we 

should be preparing against them? And which ones are simply not 

plausible or too hard to deal with? Frankly, that latter category is 

a distressing one to have to recognize, but there are certain threats 

that unless we are prepared to do a radical change in our way of 

life or unless we see the threat get a lot more plausible, I think 

the best course of action is a fairly minimal response. In other 

areas, I think we need to do more. Let me just offer a couple of 

short lists of each, dos and don’ts. 

On the don’ts, I don’t believe, for example, that we should create 

a lot of excess hospital capacity for a quarantine in the event of a 

massive contagious biological attack. Some people have laid out 

very worrisome scenarios about contagious biological attack and I 

don’t want to say these are implausible. In fact, we should spend 

a lot of time and effort on vaccines, on prevention, on monitoring 

people as they come into the country for health, trying to deal with 

health problems over seas. The H5N1 virus is an example of something we have to monitor and deal with through a health prevention approach. 

But I don’t think that we should spend what would be tens of 

billions of dollars creating excess hospital bed capacity for a scenario that is relatively unlikely to happen, and if we do have that 

scenario, it is going to be more important to respond in other ways 

16

than by having hospital beds. I throw out this scenario because 

some people have talked about the desirability of having the ability 

to have many, many thousands of people quarantined in any given 

city within hospitals in excess of what we already have—not a 

smart use of money, I don’t believe. 

There was a council on Foreign Relations study a couple of years 

ago that called for spending $20 billion a year more on first responders. I disagree. I don’t think that would be a smart use of 

scarce homeland security money. We obviously have a lot of first 

responder needs that have not yet been met and I think there is 

room for an ample serious discussion on that topic alone, and we 

have heard some mention of initiatives that would be appropriate. 

I have my own list. But I think we have to keep that kind of list 

more or less within the $5 to $10 billion a year range that we have 

been spending so far on first responders because I don’t think that 

some of the ideas that are out there make sense. Putting chemical 

protective suits for all three million first responders in the country 

at the top level of capacity, I don’t think it is the appropriate thing 

to do. 

Making sure every police and fire radio in the country can talk 

to every other one, I think that is excessive. I think what you need 

is mobile communications systems that can be interoperable, 

deployable ways for the fire and police radios to talk to each other. 

But to replace all the radios would be an excess use of resources. 

I am sorry to go through this list of don’ts, but I want to establish some credibility, I hope, before I go to a list of dos, because 

we can really have a problem with homeland security of a kitchen 

sink mentality where those of us, most people in this room, I think, 

who are homeland security hawks sometimes sound to the rest of 

the country like we just want to do every single thing we can possibly imagine, not that anybody has been guilty of that here, but 

sometimes the impression people get is that homeland security 

hawks just want to spend everything under the sun, throw in the 

kitchen sink, at this problem. We have to avoid that temptation. 

Another potential way you could spend umpteen sums of money 

would be to essentially harden our public spaces the way Israel has 

had to do. I do not believe we are now at a point in the United 

States where every single mall, restaurant, McDonald’s, movie theater should have metal detectors. We may wind up in that world, 

and the Israelis have wound up in that world. I don’t think we 

should be in that world right now because, again, I think the cost 

would be excessive. The threat is not yet credible enough to me to 

advocate that. Now, I could be proven wrong tomorrow, but I 

don’t—and we obviously need certain kinds of buildings to be protected in these sorts of ways and we always have to have the debate about which ones. But I think to establish an Israeli-level security system for every public space would be excessive. 

Finally, I don’t think we need to inspect every single container 

coming into the United States. That would be roughly a 20fold increase in capacity compared to what we do today. It would require 

major redesign of every major port in the country. It would require 

additional expense on a magnitude of maybe ten times what we 

spend now. I would not recommend that. 

17

Having said those things I would not do, let me say four things 

I would do very quickly, show my pictures, and be done. 

One, chemical plants. Chemical plants, at least the top couple 

thousand most dangerous chemical plants in the country are just 

not well enough protected today, and I will add one little point of 

commentary on Senator Gorton’s chart where he called on the private sector to take primary responsibility here. I agree with him 

partially. The private sector must do a lot of this, but I think they 

need a nudge from Washington, because if you are an individual 

owner of a chemical plant, of course, you are not going to volunteer 

to be the first one to protect your plant better than standards require. All the economic incentives are against doing so, and why 

would you want to draw attention to yourself or admit that you 

might have a vulnerability? 

So you may do a few things quietly, and some chemical plant 

owners have, but most have not and I think it would be unrealistic 

for Washington to expect them to. On the other hand, we can’t 

mandate with the heavy hand of government that every chemical 

plant in the country hire 1,000 more security guards tomorrow. 

That would be one of those don’ts that we should not do. So we 

need to figure out some compromise, and I think Congress needs 

to look at this in more detail than it has so far. 

Border capacity. I think the efforts of this Committee and others 

have been instrumental and exemplary, but still insufficient, and 

you know more about that than I, so I won’t go on. 

Local police capacity, and I am fascinated to hear what my colleagues from California have to say on this. I have some friends on 

the L.A. City Council and elsewhere who have been distressed that 

in Los Angeles, and I have heard similar stories about Chicago and 

St. Louis and Houston, other places, there is really not much dedicated capacity at the level of local police to do what New York City 

is doing, which is to try to—and New York City does remarkable 

things. They will send a police officer to a convention of mosquito 

spraying equipment to figure out if anybody is there who doesn’t 

seem to belong and might want that equipment to spray anthrax. 

I don’t think most other police departments in the country have 

thought about how to do that sort of thing, or which buildings 

might be most vulnerable to truck bombs, and therefore, perhaps, 

they should not have parking garages beneath them, or if they do, 

there should be much more rigorous inspection. Now, we all know 

there are a couple of big buildings in major cities that have taken 

these sorts of precautions, but I think New York City is the only 

city that does this systematically at the level of capacity that is appropriate. So helping cities create more capacity for preventive efforts at the level of police, I think is an appropriate third priority 

after chemical plants and border capacity. 

Last thing, and Katrina brings this to mind, we need to avoid a 

big polarized debate about DOD’s future role in disaster response. 

Some people want to say the States should always be the first responders. As Mr. Renteria said, all disasters are local—I guess it 

was Mr. Thomas—all disasters are local, all disaster response has 

to be local. At some level, of course, that is certainly true, but there 

are emergencies for which DOD is the only plausible way to marVerDate 0ct 09 2002 10:52 Jan 10, 2006 Jkt 025355 PO 00000 Frm 00021 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 S:\GPO\HEARINGS\25378.TXT SJUD4 PsN: CMORC
18

shal the kind of capacity we need and DOD is not yet good enough 

at reacting urgently. 

Historically, DOD has acted over a period of days. They are not 

yet good enough at acting within hours. They should be able to be. 

They don’t need a lot of new units. They don’t need a lot of new 

capacity. They may or may not even need a new exemption to posse 

comitatus, although I would advocate one myself, but what they do 

need is better planning to figure out how to deploy a lot of capacity 

quickly. 

OK, so those are my dos and don’ts. My apologies for going on 

a little long. I want to very quickly go through a couple of graphics 

that are not quite at the level of professionalism of my colleague, 

so I will be quick, but thankfully, Senator, your staff helped me 

make them better than they would have been otherwise. 

This is what an anthrax attack could do with an airborne dispenser, an airplane, cruise missile, crop duster, what have you, in 

Washington. The shaded area is an area of high lethality and this 

would not require any more anthrax than you could have on one 

small airplane. So you are talking about potential for obviously 

many, many thousands, actually tens of thousands of deaths from 

this sort of an attack. 

This is, of course, the worst case scenario, a hydrogen bomb. It 

is not a particularly likely terrorist threat. On the other hand, Russia still does have a lot of loose nukes that are man transportable, 

or certainly car transportable, and I don’t think we have yet 

reached the point where we can feel good about the security of Russian nuclear materials. Graham Allison at Harvard was right, I 

think, to say we should have a Fort Knox standard for all plutonium and highly enriched uranium in the world. We should guard 

that as well as we guard gold, all of it, and we haven’t yet gotten 

there, which means this threat is still plausible, hopefully very unlikely, but it is plausible even though terrorists cannot plausibly 

themselves enrich uranium or make plutonium. 

This is another version of a dirty bomb and this is perhaps a 

somewhat less likely one, but it would be far worse than the 

graphs that Mr. Thomas showed earlier because what we are talking about here is cobalt from, for example, a food irradiation plant. 

Just one rod of this cobalt could actually create enough—if dispersed explosively could create enough contamination to look sort 

of like Chernobyl in terms of its effects and leave much of Manhattan uninhabitable for decades. Actually, I was surprised to learn 

this when I worked through a little bit of the science myself, but 

this is the sort of thing that we have somewhat unguarded, or at 

least not well enough guarded in our country today. So when you 

find a specific threat that could have this kind of implication, I 

think you do need to take preventive measures. 

And this, of course, I won’t expect you to read, but this is just 

a summary of what we have learned, and some of this was done 

at DOD in their preparation for thinking through terrorist scenarios, but you have got a short list of 15 with the typical casualty 

numbers in the thousands, typical property damage numbers in the 

tens to hundreds of billions, and most of these are things we 

haven’t yet done enough to prepare against, so I will just quickly 

19

summarize that busy table with that comment and thank you for 

your patience. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. O’Hanlon appears as a submission for the record.] 

Chairman KYL. On that cheery news, we will conclude our panel 

discussion. 

[Laughter.] 

Chairman KYL. Obviously, you probably have to have a little 

humor to approach these extraordinarily serious subjects or it can 

literally keep you awake at night, but our job is to try to be as candid with the American people as possible, to bring these problems 

to their attention, and to do everything we can, along with our colleagues and those working with us at different levels of government, to be as prepared as we can for what Senator Gorton articulated was the inevitable terrorist attack of the future. 

Senator Cornyn is going to have to leave, I think, shortly, and 

so I will call upon him now either for an opening statement or if 

he has a question or so with the concurrence of my colleagues here. 

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN CORNYN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM 

THE STATE OF TEXAS 

Senator CORNYN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just have a couple 

of things I want to highlight. 

First, I would like to ask unanimous consent that my longer 

statement be made part of the record. 

[The prepared statement of Senator Cornyn appears as a submission for the record.] 

Senator CORNYN. I was glad to hear, and I knew Senator Feinstein, since she has been such a champion of this cause, would 

speak about risk-based funding, and I am glad to hear Senator 

Gorton reinforce that. That is simply a common sense, necessary 

fight that we have to keep pursuing. Unfortunately, there seems to 

be a tendency in Congress to want to split up money on a revenue 

sharing basis rather than on a risk basis, but simply put, the risk 

is too high for us to give up that fight, so we are going to keep 

pushing on that. 

I would say, coming from a State that was affected, of course, 

both by evacuees from Katrina and then hit in Rita, how badly we 

are still—what kind of bad shape we are in terms of interoperability of communications. I can’t tell you how many mayors I 

talked to who said basically they were operating on the basis of 

their cell phone. One said, ‘‘Well, I will give you my satellite telephone number if you need to call me.’’ But in other places, even in 

a big city like Houston, they did not seem to have distribution on 

the necessary basis of interoperable communications. I just wonder, 

and I think we need to do more than wonder, we need to find out 

where all the money that Congress has appropriated for this purpose has been spent, because it looks like it has not been spent as 

well as it should. 

The third issue I would highlight is continuity of government. 

This has been something that I have been concerned about. If one 

of those airplanes hadn’t been brought down in Pennsylvania and 

hit the Capitol, it could have decapitated the Federal Government’s 

20

ability to respond by killing or disabling a sufficient number of 

Senators and Congressmen that we would not be able to respond. 

While the House has attempted to deal with its ability to constitute itself by providing for emergency elections in a 49-day period, all you have to do is look at the period of time after 9/11 to 

see how a much more immediate response is required than 49 

days. Can you imagine running for election after a huge national 

emergency and just the difficulties of that? they have also attempted to deal with their quorum requirements by saying five 

members of the House can constitute a quorum and literally pass 

legislation, elect a Speaker and others, which I think has some constitutional problems, to say the least. So I hope we will continue 

working on that. 

Finally, let me just talk about evacuation and cyber security. In 

the evacuations leading up to Rita, we saw that an order of local 

officials to evacuate 1.2 million people, because of the so-called 

Katrina effect, coming on the heels of a much more devastating 

hurricane, resulted in the evacuation of 2.7 million people, with our 

highways looking like parking lots, which caused frustration, but 

fortunately, no lives were lost and it was really nothing more than 

an inconvenience. But I think, obviously, we need to look at our 

evacuation plans, and it is not within one State, but I think, literally, a regional evacuation. So we need to look at that. Of course, 

it struck me that if we were indeed talking about a terrorist attack 

as opposed to a natural disaster, we would likely have no warning 

and thus no opportunity to evacuate. 

Finally, Mr. Chairman, let me just mention cyber security is a 

cause that I have been interested in and concerned about for a long 

time. Of course, our ability to function in this economy with the 

first responders to get information is dependent on computers and 

our ability to basically include what is largely held in private 

hands, whether it is through financial institutions, local governments, or otherwise. We simply need to do a better job of protecting 

our cyber systems against computer attacks which could literally 

bring them down, disabling our first responders, affecting a body 

blow to our economy by bringing down our financial institutions or 

any one of a number of other scenarios you can think of that would 

be damaging, if not to life and limb, then certainly to our economy. 

And we need to do a better job through statutes like FISMA and 

others to enhance cyber security efforts, and I know the Department of Homeland Security is working on that, but I certainly don’t 

think we are where we need to be. 

Thank you for the opportunity to highlight a few of these issues. 

Chairman KYL. Thank you, Senator Cornyn. 

Let me begin with some questions, and I think just to have a 

good conversation, I will try to kind of stick to the 5-minute round 

concept here. We will just go back and forth. But if it takes longer 

for an answer or we have to go longer, as I said, we will not be 

strict about that. 

First let me say that I think this is a very good panel to start 

a discussion, and I would hope that we will have the time to convene—maybe even ask some of you to come back in the future, but 

to continue the discussion because it is clear that this is not just 

a one-time proposition, that we can perhaps today only scratch the 

21

surface to identify some approaches and some of the problems and 

identify areas that we want to engage in in the future. 

For example, the notion of cyber security that Senator Cornyn 

just mentioned, we have been involved in that literally for about 

9 or 10 years. I remember when we first got involved in it, and that 

is an area—and one other—that gets into a lot of classified material that I really want to begin my questioning with. 

One of you criticized—I believe it was Senator Gorton—that 

transportation plan that has been classified. This raises an interesting question of the dynamic between that which you don’t want 

terrorists to know, but that which all of the people involved in—

all of the public officials need to know and to some extent the public needs to know, the difference between a Katrina, for example, 

needing to know what the routes out of New Orleans are, and how 

we might respond to a terrorist attack. And terrorists, we know, 

from Iraq have gotten very good at planning the secondary attack. 

In other words, they draw you all to a place and then they create 

the real problem or they know what your exit or egress routes are, 

and that is where they plant the IEDs and so on. 

So, anybody, starting with you, Senator Gorton, want to make at 

least some preliminary comments about the dynamic between that 

which necessarily does need to remain classified in the terrorist 

context, because that is the focus of hearing today, versus getting 

information out in the public? 

Senator GORTON. Well, obviously, much of the work of our intelligence agencies about potential threats, about individuals, is quite 

appropriately classified. But one of the other panelists here mentioned the lack of desirability of examining, you know, every single 

container that comes into the United States by sea. You know, personally I agree with that statement. 

Nevertheless, an overall transportation plan by the Department 

of Transportation is going to have to deal with that issue. When 

should they be examined? Under what circumstances should they 

be examined? 

The people who are going to do the work in the ports here and 

elsewhere are going to have to know, you know, what those rules 

are. They are not, by and large, going to be people who have security clearances. And the difficulty here in the United States, literally almost forever, is the ease with which information is classified, the temptation once it is classified not to share it, often even 

with other agencies and the like, and the extreme difficultly of getting it declassified. This is just a particular example. 

Are there elements in an overall transportation plan that we 

should not broadcast to the world? I am sure there are. But the existence of the plan and what people who are in the private sector 

need to know about the plan in order to carry out its recommendations? Of course, they should not be classified. 

Chairman KYL. So one of the first things our Committee should 

do is to try to focus on some general principles with respect to the 

classification material so that that which needs to be classified is 

not overly restricted in sharing of it with the people that have to 

react to it and use it if there is a terrorist attack. 

Senator GORTON. Yes. 

Chairman KYL. We will try to work on that. 

22

Now, let me just quickly turn—I found this interesting, that most 

of the visual illustrations did not appear to me to postulate worstcase scenarios by any means. In fact, all of you used wind coming 

from the right direction rather than the wrong direction, as I—

well, no, excuse me. Actually, there were two. Dr. O’Hanlon, in 

yours the wind was going to from the southeast to the northwest 

to carry the radiation all the way up through Manhattan. But, 

Wayne Thomas, your explosion on the Mall blew it out toward the 

Lincoln Memorial rather than toward all of the Government buildings within the Federal enclave. 

I am not sure what my question here is, but I guess is it that 

clearly a clever terrorist, knowing that to disperse anthrax or the 

radiation from a radiological weapon or chemicals understands, appreciates the importance of wind direction, will take those calculations in mind. And we know that they are very clever and calculating people, so that we are likely to have the worst-case scenario 

where wind direction is important for the effectiveness of a terrorist attack. 

Would that be a fairly logical assumption, Mr. Thomas? 

Mr. THOMAS. Yes, sir, it is a very logical assumption. 

Chairman KYL. So we could easily have turned the wind direction around from west to east in your scenario, exploded the radiological device at the foot of the west side of the Capitol, and had 

a fairly major disaster for the Congressional office buildings, the 

Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and the Capitol itself. 

Mr. THOMAS. We certainly could have done that in the scenario. 

I think we were considering when we did that one that there would 

be an event happening on the Mall on the weekend where you 

would have a large tourist population and members of the public 

who would be impacted also. And it also went in the direction of 

the White House. 

Chairman KYL. Well, there you go. No good can come of this, is 

the bottom line of that, and I thank you for pointing that out. Just 

don’t tell the terrorists. 

Boy, you have got to have a sense of humor in this, I think, or 

it gets very depressing very, very quickly. It is such a serious proposition. 

Let me try to continue this conversation by calling on Senator 

Feinstein next, and then I will move into another series of questions. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman, and 

thank you very much for your testimony. 

I think one of the great lessons of Katrina was that every mayor 

all across the Nation is going to be saying, ‘‘Oh, my God, I don’t 

have an evacuation plan. And if I have an evacuation plan, clearly 

it is not going to be adequate.’’ 

I was a mayor for 9 years. I put a lot of effort into emergency 

planning, and what I found is that you have to have it all written 

and all rehearsed so that when something happens, the response 

is automatic and fast. You cannot wait a day or 2 days to make 

a decision. 

So you have to know, if you need to get off-duty emergency forces 

back into your city, how you do it; if you have to use buses to evacuate people, how you do it. And I think what Katrina demonstrated 

23

is that the poor in a city need help and that there has to be a special plan given high priority, whereas people who don’t have the resources are able to know where to go to be evacuated quickly. And 

I suspect nobody has that in their plan. 

You know, I had to grapple with if there were a major earthquake, what streets would you bring in earth-moving equipment. 

Where would you get the earth-moving equipment? What companies would you go to? What yards would they be stored in? Really 

technical things, where emergency beds, medical supplies could be 

billeted for long-term use. I think we are led—how could we used 

closed military bases now as points for evacuation people to go to. 

So I think there are a lot of things that Katrina brought up, but 

what I wanted to ask you is, Mr. Renteria, you mentioned that 

California will soon have its State interoperability plan. When will 

that be? 

Mr. RENTERIA. We are very pleased to report that by January 

2006 we will have a strategic plan for interoperability. As I mentioned earlier, it is a complex issue for California because of our topography and just the number of agencies, but because we do have 

some regional success stories, again, like San Diego, Orange County, we are hoping to tackle it from a regional standpoint and move 

it out. 

But the committees that— 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Will it have standards? 

Mr. RENTERIA. That is what we are hoping to have, some standards. But, again, we need some guidance also from the Federal 

Government on those— 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Now, where interoperability has been successfully developed—and by this I mean the ability of EMS personnel, sheriff’s personnel, police personnel, maybe 10, 25 different 

departments, and maybe three or four counties, to talk to each 

other in the event of an emergency. Where it has been done, how 

has it been done successfully? 

Mr. RENTERIA. That is, again, the San Diego model that we— 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Could you tell us how it has been done successfully? 

Mr. RENTERIA. They brought in all the players together, identified the radio systems, identified the different vendors that have 

been used, which is another issue that has to be addressed, different proprietary issues relative to the vendors and the private 

sector, because interoperability is beyond just radios. It is the ability to talk to each other, the standards, the common language, very 

similar to what SEMS is all about. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Are they all on a single megahertz? 

Mr. RENTERIA. I don’t think they are on a single megahertz. 

What they have done is identified the different systems that they 

have, and I don’t think there are enough channels to put everybody 

on the same radio system, which, again, goes back to some of the 

issues you mentioned earlier. 

But they have identified how they can work at that regional level 

to communicate with each other. I really want to explore more and 

communicate more with you on how they have actually done that 

so that we can— 

24

Senator FEINSTEIN. Well, let me ask you, are there any standards for this? Because one thing that became rather clear to me is 

that when all the systems went down in Louisiana, particularly in 

New Orleans, they had no way of communicating police officer to 

police officer. No way. No satellite connection, no independent system. 

So it seems to me that there are some standards that need to be 

put out there that every jurisdiction knows what they must do to 

have an emergency interoperable radio system up and running. 

Mr. RENTERIA. Absolutely. And I am glad you pointed that out 

because one of the advantages we do have in California is that we 

do have some of those systems in place, like our Operational Area 

Satellite Information System. We refer to it as ‘‘OASIS.’’ This is a 

satellite system that is in use and can be utilized by local governments also, that the State provides the communications devices for. 

So we do have some of those things in place. Our challenge is to 

make sure that we can expand it statewide, and that is what is 

going to be the biggest challenge. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. [Presiding.] We have a vote that I believe 

there are 10 minutes left in the vote, and they are now cutting off 

the vote. One time I missed a vote because I got there 60 seconds 

after it had been cutoff, so I do not want to have that happen 

again. So what I am going to do is recess. I think Senator Kyl already went to vote, but I have to as well. So I will recess the Committee, and we will be back very shortly. Thank you. 

[Recess 11:51 a.m. to 12:08 p.m.] 

Chairman KYL. [Presiding.] Let’s reconvene the hearing. My 

apologies. We had a vote called, and I thought maybe Senator Feinstein and I could play tag team, but I understand that the votes 

are being cutoff right at the designated time, which is odd for the 

Senate. And, therefore, Senator Feinstein did not want to miss that 

vote, and I do not blame her. 

Again, with only 20 minutes or so to go here, let me just again 

thank everybody for kind of writing the preamble to what I want 

to move forward with. And there are so many different questions, 

so in my remaining time, I am just going to try to set the stage 

for some future meetings. 

In that regard, several of you made points that tied together, and 

let me kind of summarize it, and then try to get the response from 

each of you. 

First of all, Mr. Bettenhausen raised what I noted as a question 

specifically to ask you, but I would like all of you to think about 

it, and that is, the differences, if any, in planning for a natural disaster versus a terrorist attack. You mentioned the difference, for 

example, in burn casualties that might be expected in a terrorist 

attack versus most natural disasters. 

Dr. O’Hanlon really did us a service, I think, by forcing us to concentrate on things not to do, not because they are not good things, 

but because you have got scarce resources, and inevitably we don’t 

have time or resources to do everything we want to do. And I would 

add a third thing, and I think some of you alluded to this, too. We 

are such a big and open country that even if we wanted to do some 

things, it would be impossible, for example, harden every shopping 

center or the like, and, therefore, to try to basically provide some 

25

triage in the planning. And one of you said one of the first questions is—I think this was Mr. Thomas. You said the first question 

you have to ask is: What do you want to achieve in developing this 

plan? 

And it seems to me there are at least three things. One, prevention. And I agree, Dr. O’Hanlon, that prevention needs to be our 

first defense. Second, protection, which is to some extent prevention, but it assumes that maybe something has happened or is happening. And, third, responding and all that that means. And we 

need plans with respect to all three, and it is not just the Federal 

Government’s job. For example, on prevention, I think you talked 

about the chemical plants, for example, and all of you in one way 

or another have talked about the need for citizens to think about 

things that they could do in their own lives and how they would 

respond as well. 

So you have got: What do we want to achieve? Between prevention and protection and response, how do we calibrate those? What 

kind of resources do we have in order to prioritize specifically what 

we do? And in the context of both natural disasters and terrorist 

attacks. 

If I could kind of frame the question that way, it is impossible 

for all of you to adequately respond to that question right now. But 

let me ask all of you to give it a shot, and then add anything you 

would like to add for our record, and then we may call you all back 

again, or if that is not convenient, in some way get your advice in 

the future. 

With that sort of four-part context, would all of you just like to 

tell me what you think we need to know in getting ready for more 

of these hearings based upon what I have said? Senator Gorton? 

Senator GORTON. Well, Mr. Chairman, I think the principal distinction between a terrorist attack and a natural disaster is that, 

by definition, a successful terrorist attack has not been predicted. 

We are trying to predict them, but when we can predict them, we 

can probably prevent them. 

But the first responders, the emergency responders are going to 

be responding to a specific incident that has not been predicted. 

Training for the disaster is vitally important. Most natural disasters are going to have been predicted. I think as Senator Feinstein 

said, we had 5 days’ notice of Katrina in many respects. 

Now, in our part of the country, we still don’t predict earthquakes very well, and an earthquake is likely to be more like the 

terrorist attack than the hurricane is. But I think that is, you 

know, the primary distinction. But the training for both, it seems 

to me, is vitally important, the kind of things we talked about: a 

proper command structure, the ability to communicate when most 

communication lines are down, all that. 

If I may indulge with two former colleagues, I would like to put 

one other thought in your mind, and that has to do with inevitable 

tendencies of any kind of governmental agency to have rules and 

regulations that are perfectly appropriate when you have got plenty of time, but that interfere when you don’t. 

If you and I, Mr. Chairman, were to change States, neither of us 

could practice law immediately upon going to the other State. We 

would have to go through some kind of procedure, which is quite 

26

reasonable. But I am a member of an organization that meets on 

various civic events every Monday, and two and a half weeks ago 

our speaker was the head of a marvelous volunteer organization of 

physicians and health care professionals in Oregon and Washington that sends volunteers all over the world to respond to health 

care emergencies. They sent people to the Indian Ocean at the time 

of the tsunami. 

The day after Katrina, they sent a crew to Baton Rouge, where 

they were promptly told they were not licensed to practice medicine 

in the State of Louisiana. And it took somewhere between 24 and 

72 hours before they could use those skills in that place. I would 

tell you this. This was reported to us by the head of the agency. 

I can certify it. 

The other one I cannot certify, but I think you might want to 

check on it. I have been told that a large number of highly professional emergency responders, firefighting officials and the like, immediately went from the Northeast down to try to help. They were 

stopped in Atlanta and told they had to undergo at least 24 hours 

of sexual harassment training before they could be sent on to do 

the things that they do, you know, by FEMA. 

Sure, people ought to be licensed to practice medicine. Sure, people ought to have appropriate training and the like. But one of the 

great inhibitors, it seems to me, is just that kind of mentality that 

rules that are perfectly OK in non-emergency situations are highly 

damaging and restrictive in emergency situations. And we and you 

at the Federal Government, we have got to see some way or another that emergency responders can respond instantaneously and 

promptly to the emergency and are not restricted by inhibitory 

rules of this nature. 

Chairman KYL. Thank you. Very enlightening. 

Mr. Thomas? 

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Chairman, I think your initial question was the 

difference between terrorist events and natural hazards. To me 

there is a very simple distinction between the two, and it involves 

prevention. We can prevent terrorist attacks. We cannot prevent 

natural hazards. They will happen. We could watch Hurricane 

Katrina march across the Gulf. We knew it was coming. We could 

not prevent the hurricane, but we could do what we needed to do 

to protect our citizens and get them out of the way. We knew it 

was affect our infrastructure. But that was all something that we 

could anticipate. 

With a terrorist attack, we don’t know where or when it will happen or what it will be. But an aggressive prevention program is a 

major distinction between the two. 

I think the other question that you posed was: What do we want 

to achieve? I think I had mentioned that in my earlier testimony. 

I think that raises the difficult questions. You know, what is the 

outcome that we want in implementing these plans, protecting the 

public? Is it 100 percent? Is it 95 percent? 

We talk about evacuating large cities. We know that certain 

parts of the population will refuse to go. Is that acceptable to us? 

These are questions that we have not really addressed. Senator 

Feinstein mentioned the poor. How do we deal with them in terms 

of ensuring their safety should a disaster happen? I think these 

27

have been largely grouped into other issues and not singled out for 

discussion and have not been addressed. 

So there is a tremendous number of issues that we need to get 

into here. You are right that we need a more substantial dialog on 

this. 

I think when we talk about results, it is not do we have a prevention plan, do we have a response plan, and so forth. Those are 

kind of the easy things to say. What does that prevention plan do? 

If we implement it, how is it successful? Is preventing all terrorist 

attacks the only measure that we can have 100 percent success? Is 

evacuating 100 percent of the population the only measure? 

Those are the things that we have to define, and I think as we 

look at those questions, that is where we have to use technology 

and other capabilities to come up with, first of all, the questions 

we want to address and then what are the acceptable solutions 

that we as, I think, collectively citizens want to have as our measures. 

Thank you. 

Chairman KYL. Thank you. Would each of you also address as we 

go on—I have been seeing something here, and that is, all of you 

believe that we need better plans, even if plans do exist. 

Mr. Renteria? 

Mr. RENTERIA. Yes. Without repeating some of the things mentioned earlier, I think some of the things that are the same have 

to do with the consequences of an event and the recovery of an 

event. Consequences, you are going to have people killed, you are 

going to have people hurt, you are going to have the property damaged or destroyed. So natural disasters, terrorists, human cause, 

whatever, you are going to have those same consequences. 

The responses to the consequences are basically the same, too. 

We train to deal with these types of events every day. We must respond to them adequately. 

The differences: When you have a terrorist event—and Matt can 

probably give you more information on this—you have a crime 

scene. That involves not just local law enforcement agencies but 

Federal. And that does complicate matters sometimes because 

some of our locals are not used to receiving this type of involvement. 

And then the other thing that makes it different—and this 

brings up my old social work background—is the psychological effects of a terrorist event versus a natural event. All sorts of psychological studies would tell you people understand these ‘‘acts of God’’ 

or something that is going to happen, may happen, and all of us 

will be affected by it. But a terrorist event brings a whole other 

level of fear and trepidation on the part of people that they cannot 

go on with their normal lives. 

To answer your question what we hope to achieve, for me it is 

cooperation and being unified in our preparedness, response, and 

recovery. We all need to be on the same page. 

Chairman KYL. Thank you very much. 

Mr. Bettenhausen? 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. Senator, let me followup with one of the 

questions you earlier had, which I think gets to some of your prevention questions, protection, and responding. And that was the 

28

issue of the classified transportation plan, and I want to echo Senator Gorton’s comments on that, but reiterate something even more 

important. 

There are not going to be enough dollars—there is already a 

backlog—to provide security clearances with everybody who has a 

potential need to know. There was the thought with intelligence reform that we were going to change the way we were doing business, that instead of writing the classified, we would write to release; that we would truly embrace our partners, the first responders, and providing them with information; and not just information 

about potential threats but strategic information. 

We know that there is a lot of intent to do us harm, but what 

is that intent? What are their capabilities? What are you picking 

up in terms of what should we prioritize and be doing first with 

the scarce dollars we have? Is it chemical? Is it biological? Is it radiological? Is it nuclear? But help us with the strategic planning. 

Write to release. Change the way that we are doing business. Nobody needs to know sources, methods, and means in terms of how 

intelligence is collected. But, you know, by God, if a cyanide truck 

has been hijacked and is missing, not only does law enforcement 

need to know where to look for it, our first responders, our hospitals, our private sector folks need to be dusting off their plans on 

how they would deal with, you know, a cyanide situation. 

So we will never have enough clearances with the turnover and 

the backlog that we have even with the Federal Government. We 

need to make sure that we are taking us full on partnership and 

that we are looking at this information that needs to be shared 

strategically and across the entire first responder community, not 

just law enforcement but also fire, our public works, and our important private sector partners. 

Another problem if you have something with a classified transportation report, it is a problem that we had with the sort of—the 

inside-the-Beltway thinking, that we are the Feds, we know how to 

do it, and, you know, you out in the hinterlands don’t have a clue. 

That was the first problem with NIMS version 1.0. They never 

asked the State and locals how to do it. They never asked California: How have you been doing emergency management so effectively? Jeb Bush, how have you been doing it? And they went and 

they hired a contractor, and they came up with a very nice system 

that was then presented sort of as a fair accompli to State and 

locals and said, ‘‘This ain’t going to work.’’ 

When you go and you have your transportation plan, who owns 

those things? Who operates it? It may be that the Federal Government needs to have a strategic plan overall, but you need to be 

talking with the State and locals, the ones who are running and 

working these things from the very beginning, not that you have 

come and thought this and now isn’t this great and present it to 

us—and, well, actually not present it to us, classify it. 

The other problem with classification, those of us who sit—I have 

my letter clearances up to SCI. To some extent, just don’t pass the 

buck and say, look, I have now informed you, but you cannot tell 

anybody else. That does me no good. All that does it pass the buck. 

You need to help me with the information and bring that together, 

because, again, as you have pointed out, prevention is the No. 1 

29

goal and priority, if we can stop it before it happens. And that’s 

what the difference is in the planning in terms of what we need 

to do versus all hazards. You cannot turn—we cannot force a tornado to change. We cannot stop an earthquake from happening. 

But we can interdict, we can deter terrorist activities with better 

infrastructure protection, with better strategic intelligence, with 

better planning in terms of trying to prevent something from happening. That helps with the planning activities. 

And then in terms of sort of terrorists, I think some of it is that 

you have—the potential for the mass casualties and the overwhelming of systems and things that you talked about with cyber, 

that if you had a magnetic pulse in terms of what that is going to 

do with our cars that now have electronics and what it is going to 

do to our computer systems, how are we going to deal with these 

issues that become just very large scale very quickly. 

So those are some of the differences, but it is still the basics. As 

my good partner Henry Renteria was talking about, to some extent 

when you are a first responder and you are going to a collapsed 

building, you don’t much care why it collapsed. Was it because of 

an earthquake? Was it because of a tornado? Was it knocked down 

by a hurricane? Or was it knocked down by the criminal acts of evil 

men? Our first priority is saving lives and preventing collateral 

damage, the kind of—even our domestic terrorists know to do the 

one-two strike. That’s what we saw on 9/11. You know, Washington, D.C., New York. New York, tower one, tower two. I mean, 

it’s an established thing, so you need to be thinking about it, and 

you have got those potentials to prevent. 

Exercises, very critical in terms of doing it, and with FEMA, 

we’ve got a statewide exercise program. That helps to develop better plans. Exercises are not about patting yourself on the back 

about what a great job we can do and how we can respond to it. 

It really is about testing your system, overloading it, push it to the 

point of failure so that you know how you can write those plans 

better, make them better, and respond better in a real instant. It 

is doing after-action reports. You know, unfortunately, we have 

more than our fair share of natural disasters in California. But the 

fortunate aspect out of it is we get a lot of lessons learned. But you 

cannot lose those things, and you need to be asking the questions: 

What went right and what went wrong? And how do you make 

sure the right things are incorporated and duplicated and the 

wrong things are pulled out of the system? 

The last thing, I forgot to thank, when I was thanking, the great 

staff that you have: the two Steves who we look forward to working 

with them, because I think you are right, we are just scratching 

the surface here, and to the extent that we can help you and work 

with your wonderful staff, we will to help flesh out some more of 

these issues. 

Chairman KYL. Thank you very much, and you are right about 

our great staff. 

We are now a little pressed for time, so, Dr. O’Hanlon, would 

you—and then I am going to turn to Senator Feinstein and leave 

and have her conclude the hearing. But if you could— 

Mr. O’HANLON. I will just say a few things, Senator. I am struck 

by how hard this problem is. I have done most of my work in my 

30

career in defense, which I think is easy compared—national security, military issues, easy compared to these questions, because 

these questions involve local, State, and Federal efforts, they involve private sector. There is such a different type of threat from 

one area to another. I think it is just an inherently very challenging field of study. 

Let me give one example and stop. There is one major city in this 

country—I will not say which one—that tried to say, OK, which of 

our big buildings do we really have to protect, provide this local 

site protection for, having done all the prevention, having prepared 

some consequence management. And they went through and in 

their first iteration came up with a couple thousand sites. And they 

said, well, there is a logic that gets you to a couple thousand, but 

it is just too many to protect, so we have to try again. 

So they went through it, the same exercise, and got down to a 

few hundred. And they said it is still too many, and they finally 

did a third round and got to a few dozen. 

Well, how do we know they got the right answer? They did not 

really get the right answer. They were constantly trading things 

off, one against the other. They came up against a problem that 

was manageable in size and yet still ambitious in scope. That underscores for me the nature of the challenge here. 

One more example, and I will stop. Skyscraper. How do you protect skyscrapers? What is the appropriate level of protection? Is it 

making sure a truck bomb cannot be—cannot get within 100 feet 

by closing off side streets? Is it making sure that air intakes are 

all at least two stories above street level so people cannot put anthrax in? Is it making sure you have security guards who are well 

trained at every entrance so that people cannot sneak explosives up 

and create an apartment bomb the way they were worried in 2002 

in New York? 

I think these are almost unanswerable questions, and the only 

way in which you can work toward pretty good answers is to have 

dedicated study ongoing from committees like this, from commissions like the 9/11 Commission, and from experts in the field. 

So it is just a way of saying this problem is inherently very hard, 

probably harder than any other problem I have studied in public 

policy. And so, therefore, I thank you for the ongoing attention 

from this Committee. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. [Presiding.] Well, you are very welcome, and 

thank you. 

Let me just begin by putting in a statement from Senator Cornyn 

into the record. 

As I listen to this, and having functioned as a mayor, it occurs 

to me that what the Department of Homeland Security might be 

doing is preparing a series of advisory standards that can go to 

local and State jurisdictions in a number of different areas, operability being one of them. 

What should the standards be as you consider interoperability? 

And what are your options? What kind of equipment is available? 

How much does it cost? Let the local jurisdictions make their own 

decisions, but there are some technical advisory standards that are 

available, certainly standards for evacuation of an area. 

31

Now, in my city this becomes particularly dangerous. The uniform forces all live outside the city, across the bridges. If bridges 

come down, how do we get the uniform forces back? That has to 

be thought of long before a major earthquake or a terrorist attack. 

How do you evacuate the poor? How do you evacuate hospitals 

if you have to, nursing homes? I thought St. Rita’s was just a terrible example of the absence of any kind of overall policy with respect to a nursing home where people watched water draw up to 

them, and then obviously drowned in it because they could not 

move. I mean, it was terrible. 

Emergency manuals. How do you prepare an emergency manual? 

What should be in that manual? How should you rehearse that 

manual? What kind of synthetic scenario should you practice out 

there based on your own individual needs geographically, politically, across this country? Standards for a family disaster plan. As 

you gentlemen have said today, families need to have their own 

plans. 

Well, I deal with this all the time. I am sure what I have is inadequate. It is put together helter-skelter, didn’t pay much attention 

to it. I do not have a checklist, those kinds of things. If you store 

water, how often should you change that water storage? How often 

should you change batteries? 

I mean, just technical things that could go out to all Americans 

to know how they need to protect themselves in the first 48 hours 

of a disaster. You know, 22,000 people int he Department of Homeland Security, and this— 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. It is 180,000. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. I beg your pardon? 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. It is 180,000. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. You are right. Excuse me. 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. It is 22 agencies. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. That is right, 180,000, and they cannot seem 

to do this kind of work. I find that inexcusable because, to me, it 

is a no-brainer of a way that, without much cost, the Federal Government could use its expertise, use its reach, and use its ability 

to bring people together to prepare something which could be of 

real practice use for local jurisdictions. 

It may well be that the State of California can play a leadership 

role in this respect, and hopefully when your plan comes out in 

January you will share it with a lot of us so that we can take a 

good look at it and see what you have done. 

I would appreciate—and I think Senator Kyl would as well—recommendations of what should we do with respect to the spectrum 

now. How should we proceed? Those recommendations I think 

would be very effective. 

But I don’t really have any other questions. If you have any closing comments in addition, I would be happy to hear them before 

I close the hearing. 

Senator GORTON. Senator Feinstein, on that very last point, I believe Senator McCain will propose an amendment when that Commerce Committee bill comes to shorten the date on spectrum transfer. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Oh, good. I am happy to hear that. 

32

Senator GORTON. It will be a tough vote, but I think he will have 

that opportunity. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Good. 

Anybody else have a last comment? Mr. Renteria? 

Mr. RENTERIA. Yes. First of all, I would like to thank Matt for 

helping us thank everybody, because I think he helped us remember all the names. But I also wanted to invite you and other Committee members to our exercise that we are going to have in California on November 15th. It is the Golden Guardian event. Matt 

Bettenhausen and I have been working very closely on it. His office 

is funding it. And so this is another opportunity for you to see—

and all of your staff to see, also—what we are doing in California. 

We are going to include an interoperability component also, so you 

can see— 

Senator FEINSTEIN. I would like to come. I will probably be in the 

Miers hearings at that time if they are going on, but I will certainly have my staff be there. 

Mr. RENTERIA. I think we can have somebody show up. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. I appreciate it. 

Mr. RENTERIA. Thank you again for this opportunity. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. You are very welcome. 

Mr. Bettenhausen? 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. And that is part of what another famous 

Californian said with exercise. We will also be working closely with 

FEMA, so we will trust but verify by doing the exercises as well. 

But I think you also pointed out with our poor communities, 

what you knew as a mayor, and what we also know from the State 

standards. It is not just poor communities that we need to make 

sure that we are doing extra planning for. It is also our special 

needs citizens that are out there, and it is one of the things that 

we have seen in terms of the exercises and practices we do with 

our nuclear power plants in terms of identifying those folks. 

But, you know, it is another role that citizens can plan, and we 

saw a lot of that with Katrina and Rita, knowing in your neighborhoods who needs help and helping us help identify them and helping—you know, being able to take care of your family and then also 

helping your neighbors. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Yes, I think even planning where to go. Most 

people, I would hazard a guess, don’t know where they would go 

in an emergency. But having something that is realistic, that gets 

you out of the immediate area where you can sustain yourself for 

a period of time, making those arrangements ahead of time. And 

I do think that is the world that we live in, that we know there 

is some place we can go, where there is some help around us. 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. Two things to followup, too. Not only does 

the California Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management have a sort of—have a preparedness campaign, because 

the First Lady of California has taken this on as a personal mission, and she has been doing a great job. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. That is great. 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. The people who have turned out, to become—be responsible for yourselves and be prepared and be ready. 

But www.ready.gov has the listing of how you can prepare a personal communications, a family communications plan, the kind of 

33

kits that you have. And an easy way to remember how to sort of 

restock in and out of there is, as you turn your clocks forward and 

back, switch the canned goods and the water out of it. The same 

thing that you should be changing your smoke detector batteries. 

It is an easy way to remember it. That is the time, you know, when 

you are doing those to— 

Senator FEINSTEIN. That is a very good idea. 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. That is when you should be doing the rest 

of your work as well. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. See, I think to some extent we get so esoteric, when most of this is good, solid, practical planning ahead of 

time. And I do not believe that the cities of America are really 

equipped for a major disaster. 

Let me just end with one thing. I think it is very important. In 

California, we have one American city that doesn’t have 100-year 

flood protection, and that is Sacramento. And the people of Sacramento should know this. If we have an earthquake and the levees go down, the flooding potential for Sacramento is enormous. 

And I very much appreciate the fact that the Governor wants to 

be of help. We want to try to get some money to facilitate maximum levee repair within a reasonably short period of time to protect the city against the loss of human life. And I think we have 

agreed that that is our No. 1 priority. 

I met yesterday with Congresswoman Matsui. I know that is 

hers. And we would really welcome continuing working with the 

Governor’s office to see that that happens. 

Mr. BETTENHAUSEN. And the entire California delegation. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. 

Mr. O’Hanlon, do you have a comment to end this thing on? 

Mr. O’HANLON. No. Thank you, Senator. 

Senator FEINSTEIN. Well, thank you all very, very much. The 

hearing is adjourned. Thank you. 

[Whereupon, at 12:38 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] 

[Questions and answers and submissions for the record follow.]

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